Seattle architecture, February 2014

 

 

 

Thoughts Mundane and Provocative on Poetry and Desire (in progress)

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The title of this post is my working title for my paper at the AWP, to be given Friday, and I thought I'd post what I have thus far here, to begin the conversation. 

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I've taken this down after two days so I can develop the piece into a publishable lyric essay--or so I hope!

Waking

I've had a winter of illness after illness, leading to a gap of months between composing poems. It feels strange when that happens, but I'm not one to worry I'm going to stop writing. I've been writing poems for over thirty years, and they always come back to me.

I'm not sure illness is the only reason for the pause, though. I've spent the better part of the last year revising my manuscript Imagined Sons through the exchange of the final manuscript and various proofs with my editor at Seren. Given the content of the work, I find each read through emotionally exhausting and wrenching. And for the last couple years, whenever I have the impulse to write poetry, I almost always write about my parents. 

In my father's case my family won a wrongful death settlement for his paralysis and pain the last two years of his life. I still feel so much anger, pain and regret almost five years on. 

My mother died most unexpectedly two years later. One week she was ill with what appeared to be a stomach virus; the next week, going in for a colonoscopy, she was dead. She was my closest friend, and every day I still feel her loss--the world seems far less generous, far less kind without her. 

So I think I may try to get away from what comes naturally to me to write and pursue one of the projects that's been welling at the back of mind, such as the erasure of Esther Summerson's chapters in Dickens's Bleak House or to address in poetry the plan to relay the Bath Abbey floor with all its memorials. I'm sure, as always, updates will follow.

Peter Reading's Stet (Secker & Warburg, 1986)

It's interesting to go back and read Stet (1986) and find the same concerns and methods I had become acquainted with in Reading's later poetry. It's a slim volume of a single poem in multiple voices and hence registers, so it's hard to excerpt. Here, though, are three passages I love. 



              Engines cut out, thick snow dumbed harmonious
              doves numbed in frozen postures of flight and we
                    found in the eerie too-bright morning
                         rhubarb leaves crusting the ice-whorled window.

*

             [Don't go out there--you'll all catch your death of it,
              sinister twits are in the ascendancy.
                     Plump up a stanza, close the brackets,
                            snuggle down into a cosy re-draft . . . ]

*


          Mirage of tangible air, heat-rippled pollened and sweet,
rises as if seen through gently vibrated cellophane, out of

          pub garden well-tended beds. Blaze of a mid-day in June;
yeastily fragrant of new bread, a buff-frothed pint of bright amber,

          cool on an oak table, gleams. (Inverse of Elegy, this.)



I believe Stet to be out of print, but it appears in full in Reading's second volume of Collected Poems.

Bin Ramke's Aerial (Omnidawn, 2012)

Some favourite passages:


Nocturnal warnings fill us with desire
to know the arts of birds
and the habits of fishes.

*

The land is the land, and home.
The water is the water, and home.
The light is the light is the air
and is its own home, we think.

*

What a contrite species this is
which does its damage by day and
by night regrets and dreams
or watches at windows.

from "Migrations of Birds and Fishes"

the beetle imago crawling two

dots on its back shiny as dew

under the murderous eye of sun

I of sunlight sizzling the morning as

if and we wait again against. For health.

end of "Living in Weather"

Everything is necessary, nothing

is sufficient. Speak to see

who listens.

second stanza of "Crystalline Structure,

Threat of Weather"

Boundaried vision and vapor conspire

to exhale, exalt into rain random dispersal into
the present. I see as far as that. I never saw farther.

from "Into Bad Weather Bounding"

   also silence might also be

white noise--all frequencies all intensities all

distance as an imagined reciprocal of absence

opening of "Contradiction, and the Enigmatic Modes"

The bird-bath encrusts itself, crystalline

graph, birds huddle and I watch from the window

the glazing of water.

from "To Breathe Together"

. . . ordinary,

this secretly separate sifting
of a self particulate, drifting

from "Desire. Consider. Star. Ice."

We begin. No, we don't. We hover over choices, claiming and

proclaiming one thing as beginning

then another.

from "Articulation"

. . . a shock it is to find you have a past 

not the one you remember. Forgone, forgotten.

end of "Beautiful Island:"

In the UK, Bin Ramke's Aerial is available from Foyle's, presently at a 22% discount.

Matt Bryden's 'Brest Litovsk' from Boxing the Compass (Templar, 2013)

Brest Litovsk

Drop a shroud over a country –

food aid, shelter, nightfall,

enough to forget about it, let

it get by.

You can walk right up to it,

whip off the covers –

an angle-poise lamp under sack,

a starscape.

Silent, contoured, like camouflage

netting pulled over a tank –

there are handholds,

footfalls for the blind.

You like to imagine the conundrum –

an ant crossing a table-top comes upon

a sugar cube 1cm by 1cm by 1cm:

how far is added to its journey? –

that a shirt hung from the nozzle

of a tank might obscure it,

that you could walk across

a country covered in such a fashion –

tottering over plate, doll, bone

and crush them without noticing –

a sprawling landfill, a Milky

Way teeming with animals,

a bee in the hand.

Matt Bryden's first collection, Boxing the Compass, is available directly from the publisher for £8.99, postage free worldwide. 

At the Time of Partition by Moniza Alvi (Bloodaxe, 2013)

Some favourite passages:


Like a conquered king,
the story limps away.

Pity the ending.
No story has an ending.

Attend the burial--
there will be a resurrection.

*

One day--that sliver of time

in which anything can happen
and often doesn't,

but sometimes time take one day
by the hand, or the scruff of the neck.

That day when any story
takes a deep breath

                                and begins--

*

In an exodus, such a child
grown up and not grown up

was ripe for being lost.

*

A line so delicate a sparrow might have
picked it up in its beak.

from "The Line"

Under duress, 

it [the house] was dauntingly calm.

from "Ever After"

Where will you live?

Have you any arrangements?

An arrangement?

It lay breathing at the end of the tunnel.

Hopped towards her like a tamed bird.

Like a kite, it tangled in the trees. 

*

At this point the back

of the story

                    begins to break.

Can it walk at all?

Or hobble with a stick?

Will it close its eyes and drift into sleep?

How to serve it well?

from "So They Took the Bus"

How did she come to be here

in a place so in love with no?

from "No"

The nothingness was palpable--

you could pluck it from the air.

from "The Camp"

A nation in its instability,

one that could change lives

with the suddenness of a blow to the head.

from "And Where?"

What was there to cling to

but hope?

The fine escarpment of hope.

from "Continuing"

At the time of posting, Moniza Alvi's At the Time of Partition is available for 27% off from Foyle's. 

Exteroceptive by Sarah Hayden (Wild Honey Press, 2013)

achingly precise

high humming seeming scatter



unfolding its rhythm

slow

and shameless



somewhere        beneath it all

is the lodestone of a metronome

             comforting still

though a deep

meticulous burial has swallowed the thick

tick

from "Optic"

...what he would be compelled to say

and only just manage to hold behind his teeth

*

what is this wetness we are straining at

snapping our leashes

on the bounceback

whyso urgent, fellow traveller?

from "Auditory"

your verti-vapour would undoubtedly turn me on (

or would--if i could only ignore your bit-champing amaneunsis)

*

this is the artist grouting only the most obvious angles of approach

*

mollescent, uncorsetted, i can only acknowledge participation

and stamp it full-righteous with customized rubber

from "[Proprio]"

1 when the tinfoil was folded back, this chicken was rendered rrruminant and too sad to eat. We rushed to remake it as a story. This, in a loud place and, lest any soldier falter, lubricated by prefatory laughter.

from "Olfactory"

fragments

of their snowdriven transmissions drag and stick moreishly

from "Haptic"

Exteroceptive is available from Wild Honey Press for €5. She also has a new pamphlet just out from Oystercatcher, System Without Issue. 

Rhian Gallagher's Shift (Enitharmon, 2012)

I read with Rhian Gallagher on the King's Lynn Poetry Festival in September and this weekend finally found the time to read her second collection, Shift. Here are my favourite passages:


Not moving an inch,
myself to myself become a mystery.

last lines of "Under the Pines"

                                     Yet rain falling over the city

is like a hammer, a thousand pianos at the adagio.

*

I am equal to the wound of any blade.

from "The Gospel According to Longing"

...till the architecture seemed made of lights alone.

from "Becoming"

The mountains do not rescue us, or the light

or the tender microclimate of the bay below.

We have it all and are lost.

from "Crossroad"

The season bends.

from "Prospect Park"

A white wing blurs over lagoon and paddock,

flick of a magician's cloth.

from "The Big Dark"

Some days, blind to stone and wing,

more or less moving,

when I am picked up

by the scent again

and am shaken

margin of every elsewhere here.

*

The southerly boots in, flanked by coal-dark cloud

polar-particled, mean as.

from "Shore"

The sun

roaring in my head.

last words of "Sea Change"

The wind stirring above the range

and angel, a parachute with no body.

from "The High Country"

You can purchase Shift for directly from its publisher, Enitharmon Press, by going here.

A student article on yours truly

Ben Franks, an undergraduate at Bath Spa University, has written a flattering article on me based on an interview we did, and it's up at his own Pie Magazine. Thanks, Ben, for the kindnesses therein!